These classnotes are depreciated. As of 2005, I no longer teach the classes. Notes will remain online for legacy purposes

UNIX01/Enter The Penguin

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The first glimmer of hope against what was quickly becoming known as "The Evil Empire" (Microsoft) and their cabal of cheap, undernourished systems, was when William Jolitz ported BSD onto a 386 box, publicized by a series of magazine articles beginning in 1991. The 386BSD port was possible because, partly influenced by Stallman, Berkeley hacker Keith Bostic had begun an effort to clean AT&T proprietary code out of the BSD sources in 1988. But the 386BSD project took a severe blow when, near the end of 1991, Jolitz walked away from it and destroyed his own work. There are conflicting explanations, but a common thread in all is that Jolitz wanted his code to be released as unencumbered source and was upset when the corporate sponsors of the project opted for a more proprietary licensing model.

In August 1991 Linus Torvalds, then an unknown university student from Finland, announced the Linux project. Torvalds is on record that one of his main motivations was the high cost of Sun's Unix at his university. Torvalds has also said that he would have joined the BSD effort had he known of it, rather than founding his own. But 386BSD was not shipped until early 1992, some months after the first Linux release.

The importance of both these projects became clear only in retrospect. At the time, they attracted little notice even within the Internet hacker culture - let alone in the wider Unix community, which was still fixated on more capable machines than PCs, and on trying to reconcile the special properties of Unix with the conventional proprietary model of a software business.

It would take another two years and the great Internet explosion of 1993-1994 before the true importance of Linux and the open-source BSD distributions became evident to the rest of the Unix world. Unfortunately for the BSDers, an AT&T lawsuit against BSDI (the startup company that had backed the Jolitz port) consumed much of that time and motivated some key Berkeley developers to switch to Linux.

This lawsuit was settled out of court because the judge felt that AT&T would have lost their case against BSDi. The court documents are sealed, but it is clear from statements at the time that the judge felt that BSD's contributions to UNIX were so great and AT&T's contributions were so small, that AT&T would have been at fault instead of BSD. In other words, AT&T developers took code from BSD rather than the other way around. University of Berkely and BSDi counter-sued AT&T and USL and settled out of court. This lawsuit probably has some bearing on the current SCO case.

In 1993, Linux development exploded due to the easy accessability of the Internet at colleges and institutions. Developers joined from all around the globe to contribute to Linux (and the utilities that ran on top of Linux such as the GNU utilities). By late 1993, Linux had both Internet capability and X. The entire GNU toolkit had been hosted on it from the beginning, providing high-quality development tools. Beyond GNU tools, Linux acted as a basin of attraction, collecting and concentrating twenty years of open-source software that had previously been scattered across a dozen different proprietary Unix platforms. Though the Linux kernel was still officially in beta (at 0.99 level), it was remarkably crash-free. The breadth and quality of the software in Linux distributions was already that of a production-ready operating system.

A few of the more flexible-minded among old-school Unix developers began to notice that the long-awaited dream of a cheap Unix system for everybody had snuck up on them from an unexpected direction. It didn't come from AT&T or Sun or any of the traditional vendors. Nor did it rise out of an organized effort in academia. It was a bricolage that bubbled up out of the Internet by what seemed like spontaneous generation, appropriating and recombining elements of the Unix tradition in surprising ways.



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